Sunday, January 16, 2011

Revolutionary War sample essay question

1)Analyze the political, diplomatic, and military reasons for the United States victory in the Revolutionary War. Confine your answer to the period 1775–1783.

POLITICAL
•Locke and the Enlightenment
•Pre-1775 actions leading to 1775–1783 actions
•Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty or give me death”
•Edmund Burke and William Pitt, British sympathizers
•Antiwar riots
•Dunmore Proclamation (1775)
•Loyalists, including Indians and African Americans
•Second Continental Congress
         o Olive Branch Petition
         oWashington, commander of the army
         o Declaration of Independence
•Thomas Paine, Common Sense and The Crisis
•Articles of Confederation
•Collapse of Lord North’s ministry, 1782

DIPLOMATIC
•Olive Branch Petition
•French Alliance, 1778
•Benjamin Franklin, ambassador to France
•John Adams, ambassador to Holland
•League of Armed Neutrality
•Treaty of Paris, 1783
      o JohnAdams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay
•British sympathy, Whigs
MILITARY
•Patriot advantages
      o Just cause
      o American geographical expanse
      o Fighting on home ground, distance from England
      o Experience from earlier colonial wars
      o Minutemen
•Ethan Allen (Green Mountain Boys)
     o Benedict Arnold
     o Fort Ticonderoga
•Evacuation of Boston, Henry Knox
•British occupation of American cities
— New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah
•No effective British blockade of American coast
•Hessians
•Important figures:
     o George Washington o Nathanael Greene
     o Horatio Gates
     o John Paul Jones
     o Paul Revere
     o Francis Marion, “Swamp Fox”
     o George Rogers Clark
     o John Sullivan
     o Marquis de Lafayette
     o Baron Von Steuben
     o CasimirPulaski
     o Thaddeus Kosciusko
     o Baron de Kalb
     o General William Howe
     o Admiral Richard Howe
     o General Thomas Gage
     o General Henry Clinton
     o General John Burgoyne
     o Lord Charles Cornwallis
     o Joseph Brant
BATTLES
     o Lexington and Concord, April 1775
     o Fort Ticonderoga, May 1775
     o Invasion of Canada, fall of 1775
     o Bunker Hill (Breed’s Hill), June 1776
     o Brooklyn Heights, August 1776
     o Defeat of Cherokees, Virginia, Carolinas, September 1776
     o Trenton, December 1776
     o Princeton, January 1777
     o Saratoga, October 1777; led to French alliance
     o Valley Forge, 1777–1778
     o Monmouth Court House, June 1778
     o Vincennes, February 1779
     o Elmira, August 1779
     o Savannah, October 1779
     o Charleston, May 1780
     o Kings Mountain, October 1780
     o Cowpens, January 1781
     o Guilford Court House, March 1781
     o Yorktown, October 1781 — “The world turned upside”
•Role of women — nurses, soldiers, camp followers